Ugly Talk

Episode 20 - Speedrunning

Released: Feb 21, 2018

Speedrunning is a rather esoteric hobby of trying to beat games as quickly as possible under specific conditions. It's difficult to say where it began or what the first speedrun was, but on this day in the year of our lord two thousand eighteen it's grown into a large community that contains many smaller subcultures.

To the outside observer, speedrunning may seem like a fruitless or impossible task to pick up, as observation of the fastest run shows that runners immediately understand the whole game and execute it to the finest degree in ways not conceived by the developers. What is actually being observed in each speedrun, however, is the end product of dozens of hands in perfecting a route and hours of practice before finally reciting the sequence in a run.

No man is an island, and there's no wrong way to play. In this episode, we talk about this concept as it relates to tabletop gaming with our friend Greg Bennett of Technical Difficulties.